“We’ll prepare you for life,” the colorful school brochure assured me, “the way it really is.”

It has become an educational shibboleth: “We’re here,” schools at every level claim, “to get you ready for the real world.”

But do they? If that’s a significant measure of a school’s success, a painful list of them deserve failing grades. For what many schools—both public and private—have to offer these days is an incredible distance from life the way most of us really live it.

A Connecticut middle-school moment:

On a reporting trip in Connecticut last week for a forthcoming story, I spent a morning in a seventh-grade classroom. The students were diligently finishing up a worksheet on a book they were reading together. Once they turned in their sheets, the teacher set aside time for them to read the local newspaper—the print edition! The teacher has them regularly write reports on newspaper articles.

Robin Prather, a retired children’s librarian in Oregon and a Christian, volunteers at a school library in the district where she used to work. A fellow librarian pointed out a title to her in an upcoming popular reading competition for third- through fifth-graders: George by Alex Gino.

Emily Curran expects opposition for her pro-life beliefs.

Her parents started taking her to prayer vigils outside abortion centers when she was a child, and she witnessed firsthand the vitriol abortion supporters sometimes hurl at people pleading for the lives of unborn babies. But that didn’t make it any easier to face the same kind of ridicule and derision in her own high-school cafeteria.

Next time you think things have gotten intolerably bad, and that the world is headed for hell in a handbasket, just think what things might be like if all decision-making were handed to today’s teenagers—the relatively young adults who a decade or two from now, whether you like it or not, will indeed be in the driver’s seat.

Two issues prompted me to worry along those lines.

HALLSVILLE, Texas—No sign marks the entrance to Heartlight Ministries, set off a two-lane highway in East Texas. Its dozen or so log cabin buildings are nestled among tall pine trees, hidden in deep pools of shade. No gate blocks its entrance; no fence warns visitors to stay away. Drivers who turn onto its curved road by accident might mistake it for a bucolic resort.

KATY, Texas—As she walked the halls of Aristoi Classical Academy on a recent October afternoon, headmaster Brenda Davidson greeted most of the students by name. She wound her way around classes meeting on the floor of the Alief Baptist Church gym, the students separated by temporary partitions that blocked the view but not the sound of the next-door lessons. In one history classroom, middle schoolers proudly displayed elaborate models of iconic American buildings: the White House, Monticello, the Washington Monument.